Blood Brotherhoods (101 page)

This was not an empty boast. Compared to the other heartlands of criminal power on the southern Italian mainland, Sicily did have a much greater depth and variety of experience when it came to resistance against the mafia. We have already encountered the traditions embodied by Communist leader Pio La Torre and General Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa. The investigating magistrates Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino were themselves, in some senses, the inheritors of those divergent traditions of resistance to the mafia: Falcone was a man of the left, and Borsellino had right-wing sympathies.

The post-war years had seen other, perhaps more sporadic examples of anti-mafia activity. Like the ‘Sicilian Gandhi’, Danilo Dolci, whose campaign against poverty in the 1950s soon brought him up against one of that poverty’s underlying causes. Or the courageous investigative journalists of
L’Ora
, who were denouncing the mafia in the general silence of the late 1950s. Or the vast public demonstration that accompanied the funerals of the four
Carabinieri
, two military engineers and a policeman killed by the Ciaculli car bomb in 1963. The new dissident left groups that emerged after 1968 also had a strong anti-mafia tendency. In 1977 a small group of militants founded a study centre in Palermo that was destined to be a constant presence in anti-mafia campaigns. Peppino Impastato, the left-wing journalist son of a
mafioso
from Cinisi, near Palermo’s airport, for years harangued the local boss Tano Badalamenti—the boss of all bosses in the mid-1970s. Impastato paid with his life for his devotion to the cause: in 1978 he was tied to a railway line and blown up. For a long time, the authorities dismissed his death as a bungled terrorist attack.

The bloody years of mafia conflict after 1979 saw the flowering of new and much more insistent forms of resistance. An estimated 100,000 people packed themselves into Palermo’s piazza Politeama for Pio La Torre’s funeral in 1982. A mass torch-lit parade followed Rocco Chinnici’s death in 1983. Victims’ families and their supporters formed support groups and campaigning organisations. Students staged rallies in support of the police. The anniversaries of the worst atrocities, notably the death of General Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa, became the occasion for demonstrations and other initiatives. Back in 1972, a Sicilian Communist leader had complained, ‘Why are we [i.e., Communists] the only ones who talk about the mafia?’ By the time the bunker courtroom was built, his lament was no longer justified.

Mayor Orlando’s own story—he was a lawyer close to the Jesuits—spoke of an increasingly vocal strain of Catholic anti-mafia feeling. Priests were beginning to talk about the mafia in their sermons. Groups of Catholic activists embraced the anti-mafia cause. Moreover, extraordinarily, bloodstained
Palermo was witnessing the first hints of a truly epoch-making shift in the attitude of the Church hierarchy.

The Church had rubbed along pretty well with Sicily’s Honoured Society for more than a century. As ever, the reasons were political. The Papacy was one of the losers in the process that had made Italy one country with its capital in Rome: the Pope lost all of his earthly territory apart from Vatican City. Thereafter, the Pope banned Catholics from voting or standing for elections in Italy. Alienated from the state, and true to their profoundly conservative instincts, bishops and priests sought out alternative sources of authority in the society around them. And
mafiosi
proved adept at posing as a traditional source of authority. In Sicily, as in Campania and Calabria, local saints’ days and processions gave the men of violence the chance to parade their power, while seeming to soften its brutal edges.

By the Second World War’s end, Church and state had been reconciled. During the Cold War, Catholicism ceased to be marginal to Italy’s political system, and became central. A Catholic party, the Christian Democrats, dominated the political scene and formed a shield against the satanic forces of Communism. The mafia sheltered behind that shield, and found succour in the Cold War fervour of leading clerics. One notorious case was Ernesto Ruffini, the Cardinal Archbishop of Palermo for two decades: he repeatedly denounced any talk of the ‘so-called mafia’ as a left-wing plot to undermine Sicily.

As the violence grew in 1980s Palermo, Ruffini’s successor, Cardinal Archbishop Salvatore Pappalardo, started to send out very different signals. In November 1981, the mafia-backed politicians who were assembled in Palermo Cathedral for the feast of Christ the King squirmed in discomfort as they heard him outline their complicity in murder:

Street crime, operating in the open, is almost inextricably tied in a complex web with occult manipulators who perform shady business dealings under the cover of cunning protectors. The manual labourers of murder are tied to the men who instigate their crimes. The bullies on every street corner and in every quarter of the city are tied to
mafiosi
whose range and dominion is much more vast.

At General Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa’s funeral in September 1982, Cardinal Pappalardo’s angry denunciation of the government’s failure to come to Palermo’s aid made headlines even in the Communist daily,
L’Unità
.

At that point, the mafia found its own way to tell the Cardinal what it thought of his anti-mafia turn. At Easter the following year, Pappalardo respected a long-standing custom by going to the Ucciardone to celebrate
Mass with the inmates. But when he reached the prison chapel he found that every single seat was empty. A journalist observed the scene:

For almost an hour the Cardinal waited in vain for the prisoners to leave their cells. In the end, he came to the bitter realisation that they were absent because they wanted to send him a clear, hostile signal. At that point he got into his little Renault and was driven back to the curia by his assistant.

Yet within the Church, as across Palermo, the sight of the bunker courtroom and the impending spectacle of the maxi-trial provoked unease rather than hope in many. Perhaps because he was unnerved by his experiences in the Ucciardone, or perhaps because someone in the Vatican had a quiet word, Cardinal Pappalardo made a shuffling retreat from his explicit pronouncements against the mafia. Interviewed before the maxi-trial, he blamed the media for sensationalising mafia violence and said: ‘The Church is worried that holding such a big trial might attract too much concentrated attention on Sicily. I am anxious about it, and in some ways alarmed. Palermo is no different to other cities.’

The Catholic Church in Italy has always tended to regard the public performance of earthly justice as if it were a distasteful parade of crude state power. As if the courthouse was somehow a sinister rival to the cathedral. Cardinal Pappalardo, like all too many clerics before him, now seemed to have retreated behind the catchall language of evil, suffering and forgiveness:
mafiosi
were just sinners like the rest of us. Despite all the bloodshed, and despite the heroic sacrifices made so far, the Church was not yet ready to take an explicit stand against Cosa Nostra and in favour of the rule of law.

There were still more insidious voices of doubt in Palermo in the run-up to the maxi-trial. Some said that it was going to ruin the city’s image. One politician hoped that it would all be over and forgotten soon, so that the bunker courtroom could be turned into something useful, like a conference centre. Sicily’s most influential daily, the
Giornale di Sicilia
, was distinctly lukewarm about the whole judicial enterprise, and its editor explicitly sceptical about the key issue of the relationship between the mafia and the institutions of the state:

Today the mafia is fundamentally unconnected to power. I don’t believe it can be said that there are organic links between power and the mafia; just as it can’t be said that every corrupt man in public life is necessarily a
mafioso
.

As if to prove this assertion, on the eve of the maxi-trial, the
Giornale di Sicilia
sacked a crime correspondent who had been particularly diligent in his work on mafia issues.

Silently watching the evolving spectacle was a nervous, amorphous, and far from entirely innocent majority of the city’s population. Some voices blamed the anti-mafia magistrates for creating unemployment. The argument was groundless, of course: mafia influence had caused scandalous waste and inefficiency for generations. But that did not deaden the ring of truth it had for the architects and civil engineers who profited nicely from the corrupt construction system; for the bankers who did not care where their customers’ money came from; for the owners of swanky boutiques and restaurants on via Libertà whose businesses floated high on the trickle-down profits of narcotics; for the idlers who had pulled in favours to get a public-sector job, or for the worker bees of the narcotics and contraband tobacco industries.

Palermo remained hard to decipher in the 1980s. Every pronouncement by a public figure was scrutinised for a coded comment on the work of the anti-mafia pool. Giovanni Falcone gave a resolutely optimistic reading of the public mood in the city of his birth. He talked about the numerous letters of support and admiration that he and his colleagues received. And of how the young people who staged demonstrations in favour of the investigating magistrates were showing great maturity: ‘They have shown that, in the struggle against the mafia, party political labels are irrelevant.’ The journalists interviewing him probed him further about his increasing fame, and the conflicting views of what he was doing.

You certainly don’t have an easy relationship with this city. There are those who say that you tend to overdo things, that you want to ruin Sicily. Then there are people who, albeit in a whisper, say, ‘What we need is a thousand Falcones.’ What is your reply?

Falcone gave a typically unassuming response, one designed to play down the familiar and potentially dangerous idea that the anti-mafia cause was a personal crusade. ‘I would like to say to this city: men come and go. But afterwards their ideas and the things they strive for morally remain, and will continue to walk on the legs of others.’

The maxi-trial began on 10 February 1986. As it did, Cosa Nostra’s guns fell silent while the bosses waited for the curtain to lift on the trial drama.

Meanwhile, as if to remind Italians just how high were the stakes in Palermo’s bunker courtroom, the slaughter continued unabated elsewhere—and with it organised crime’s insidious hold over the state machinery and the democratic process designed to run it. Palermo may have been living through an optimistic interlude in the run-up to the maxi-trial, but across the country the political system was becoming yet more dysfunctional: a ‘rule of non-law’.

 
64 

T
HE RULE OF NON-LAW

I
N
C
AMPANIA
,
THE MILITARY AND JUDICIAL DEFEAT OF THE
P
ROFESSOR
’
S
N
UOVA
Camorra Organizzata meant that the coalition formed to oppose him, the Nuova Famiglia, had the region to itself. Once victory was assured, the NF immediately descended into a bloody internecine struggle to control the post-earthquake economy. The first signs of that war came in Marano, the town just to the north of Naples where the Nuvoletta clan—Cosa Nostra’s viceroys in Campania—had their notorious farmhouse.

On 10 June 1984 four cars screeched through the centre of Marano, firing wildly at one another with machine guns and pistols. A bystander, Salvatore Squillace, aged twenty-eight, was hit in the head: yet another innocent victim of camorra violence. The
Carabinieri
investigating his death traced the cars’ route back up to a place they knew well, because they had searched it several times: the farmhouse shrouded by trees that was the operational base of the Nuvoletta crime family. There they found the aftermath of a huge gun battle. The front of the house was pockmarked by bullets, and shell cases were strewn all around. Searching further, down an avenue leading away from the house they found the body of a man, his forehead flattened by a pistol shot fired at close range: it was one of the younger Nuvoletta brothers, Ciro. Extraordinarily, someone had staged a frontal assault on the most powerful
camorristi
of all.

The first journalists to report on the incident, well aware of the Nuvolettas’ leading role in the resistance to the Nuova Camorra Organizzata, speculated that the Professor’s men were responsible. Was this the sign of an NCO resurgence? The true significance of the gun battle in Marano only
emerged later. The geography of camorra power was shifting. With the NCO on its way to defeat, the victorious alliance, the Nuova Famiglia, had begun to splinter. The Nuvolettas, the oldest camorra dynasty, the pillar around which Cosa Nostra had built its Campanian protectorate, stood to be eclipsed. And as they were, the Sicilian mafia’s influence in Campania came to an end, the camorra came of age, and the face of much of the region was transformed.